Angus Burgin F'09

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Early Career Fellowship Program Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowships 2009
Department: History
Harvard University
The Return of Laissez-Faire

This project examines the development of conservative political thought between 1932 and 1964, focusing on the transatlantic membership of the Mont Pelerin Society. It examines the internal debates that led the conservative intellectual movement from a period of fragmentation in the early 1930s to the postwar establishment of defined ideological programs and permanent institutional structures. As the members of the Mont Pelerin Society grew in prominence, the project argues that they advocated an increasingly robust form of laissez-faire, and that this transformation brought about an enduring division within the conservative intellectual world.